I am not a patient person. Ask anyone I know. So the fact that I had to wait almost four weeks for the documents I requested from the New York City municipal archives, especially since I had provided both names AND certificate numbers, miffed me just a little bit. I get that they're busy - but don't they get how important my genealogy research is?? To me???

So three out of the four documents I requested were waiting for me in the stack of mail when I got home. The first, Peter Stutzmann's death certificate, is definitely my Peter Stutzmann. I knew it the moment I saw the address at which he died, 54 Morrell Street in Brooklyn. That's where the Stutzmanns were living at that time (1892). Disappointingly, it does not provide his parents' names, though I had wanted that only to verify information I already had, but it did confirm for me that he died in New York even though he pretty much didn't live here - according to his death certificate he had only been living here for four months. And it gives me the cemetery he was buried in, Evergreens, so now I can find his gravesite. So that's kind of cool. Peter Stutzmann, by the way, was my great-great-great grandfather, from Grossbockenheim, Germany.

I received two other death certificates, too - one for Catharina Ann Rhinehart and one for Magdalena Reinhardt, both died in 1887, on the suspicion that one may be my fifth-great grandmother, who went by a variety of first names and who may have died in Brooklyn in 1887. Unfortunately, neither gives parents' names, which was what I was really hoping for, or a maiden name, which would have helped confirm or eliminate, but it gives addresses and the names of children to whom the certificate was delivered, so I have clues to work with, but I am going to have to examine both of these documents much more closely before I can make any kind of determination, but I will keep you posted.